From downloadable chemistry to desktop chemical processing plants

“Modern chemical processing plants take multi million dollar investments. 3d printing is not just for creating solid objects, this innovation points to new direction. Think about this such 3d printers can be refined and developed to produce not just pharma but most essential chemical formulations needed by individuals and households like soaps,detergents, dental creams, cleaners and so on. It reduces dependency on centralized large scale chemical process facilities.”

Lee Cronin “shows me the printer, a nondescript version of the £1,200 3D printer used in the [email protected] project, which aims to bring self-fabrication to the masses. After a bit of trial and error, Cronin’s team discovered that it could use a bathroom sealant as a material to print reaction chambers of precisely specified dimensions, connected with tubes of different lengths and diameters. After the bespoke miniature lab had set hard, the printer could then inject the system reactants, or “chemical inks”, to create sequenced reactions.

The “inks” would be simple reagents, from which more complex molecules are formed. “If I was being facetious I would say that to find your inks you would go to the periodic table: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on,” Cronin says, “but obviously you can’t handle all those substances very well, so it would have to be a bit more complex than that. If you were looking to make a sugar, for example, you would start with your set of base sugars and mix them together. When we make complex molecules in the traditional way with test tubes and flasks, we start with a smaller number of simpler molecules.” As he points out, nearly all drugs are made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, as well as readily available agents such as vegetable oils and paraffin. “With a printer it should be possible that with a relatively small number of inks you can make any organic molecule,” he says.

The real beauty of Cronin’s prototype system, however, is that it allows the printer not only to control the sequences and exact calibration of inks, but also to shape, from a tested blueprint, the environment in which those reactions take place. The scale and architecture of the miniature printed “lab” could be pre-programmed into software and downloaded for use with a standard set of inks. In this way, not only the combinations of reactants but also the ratios and speed at which they combine could be ingrained into the system, simply by changing the size of reaction chambers and their relation with one another; Cronin calls this “reactionware” or, because it depends on a conceptualised sequence of flow and reorientation in a 3D space, “Rubik’s Cube chemistry”.

“What we are trying to do is to combine the notion of a reaction with a reactor,” he says. “Conventionally the reactor is just the passive space or the environment in which a reaction takes place. It could be something as simple as a test tube. The printer allows it to be a far more active context.”

So far Cronin’s lab has been creating quite straightforward reaction chambers, and simple three-step sequences of reactions to “print” inorganic molecules. The next stage, also successfully demonstrated, and where things start to get interesting, is the ability to “print” catalysts into the walls of the reactionware. Much further down the line – Cronin has a gift for extrapolation – he envisages far more complex reactor environments, which would enable chemistry to be done “in the presence of a liver cell that has cancer, or a newly identified superbug”, with all the implications that might have for drug research.

In the shorter term, his team is looking at ways in which relatively simple drugs – ibuprofen is the example they are using – might be successfully produced in their 3D printer or portable “chemputer”. If that principle can be established, then the possibilities suddenly seem endless. “Imagine your printer like a refrigerator that is full of all the ingredients you might require to make any dish in Jamie Oliver’s new book,” Cronin says. “Jamie has made all those recipes in his own kitchen and validated them. If you apply that idea to making drugs, you have all your ingredients and you follow a recipe that a drug company gives you. They will have validated that recipe in their lab. And when you have downloaded it and enabled the printer to read the software it will work. The value is in the recipe, not in the manufacture. It is an app, essentially.”

What would this mean? Well for a start it would potentially democratise complex chemistry, and allow drugs not only to be distributed anywhere in the world but created at the point of need. It could reverse the trend, Cronin suggests, for ineffective counterfeit drugs (often anti-malarials or anti-retrovirals) that have flooded some markets in the developing world, by offering a cheap medicine-making platform that could validate a drug made according to the pharmaceutical company’s “software”. Crucially, it would potentially enable a greater range of drugs to be produced. “There are loads of drugs out there that aren’t available,” Cronin says, “because the population that needs them is not big enough, or not rich enough. This model changes that economy of scale; it could makes any drug cost effective.”

Not surprisingly Cronin is excited by these prospects, though he continually adds the caveat that they are still essentially at the “science fiction” stage of this process. Aside from the “personal chemputer” aspect of the idea, he is perhaps most enthused about the way the reactionware model could transform the process of drug discovery and testing. “Over time it may redefine how we make molecules,” he believes. “In particular we can think about doing complex reactions in the presence of complex chemical baggage like a cell, and at a fraction of the current cost.” Printed reactionware could vastly speed up the discovery of new proteins and even antibiotics. In contrast to existing technologies the chemical “search engine” could be combined with biological structures such as blood vessels, or pathogens, offering a way to quickly screen the effects of new molecular combinations.”

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WRITTEN BY

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.